"It's not yet a gift": understanding digital gifting

A myriad of digital artifacts are routinely exchanged online. While previous studies suggest that these are sometimes considered to be gifts, CSCW has largely overlooked explicit digital gifting where people deliberately choose to give digital media as gifts. We present an interview study that systematically analyzes the nature of digital gifting in comparison to conventional physical gifting. A five-stage gift exchange model, synthesized from the literature, frames this study. Findings reveal that there are distinctive gaps in people’s engagement with the digital gifting process compared to physical gifting. Participants’ accounts show how digital gifts often involve less labor, are sometimes not perceived as gifts by the recipient and are rarely reflected on and reciprocated. We conclude by drawing out design implications for digital gifting services and rituals

The Institute For Digital Life And Ephemera (IDLE)

IDLE was created in 2016 to address the increasing ephemerality of digital culture. Digital technologies allow us to create and share content across the globe more easily than ever before, but that culture is at risk of being lost for future generations. As websites are taken down or revised, earlier versions are lost. Social media offers a record of daily life in the 21st Century but also vanishes into the digital ether. Devices quickly become obsolete and so how they were experienced and used also gets lost. The revolutions in storytelling facilitated by digital platforms have created fascinating, but intangible, experiences. IDLE is committed to developing an archive of digital culture that fully represents life in the 21st century. We used this backdrop story to explore what it would mean to loose such an all-encompassing archive or in effect all of our digital archives, as we certainly cannot guarantee the long-term availability and quality of digital data. We project that in 2020, a solar flare will have wiped the planet’s digital records and that this will have disproportionally affected the human history of the last few decades. In this context, we developed and sent out the ‚Storytelling Box’ with the aim to begin to recreate an archive, but also to engage storytellers and audiences with what it means to develop engaging story content. We document the storytelling box, document the ways that we engaged storytellers with the process and critically reflect on the outcomes

Musical intersections across the digital and physical

Digital musical experiences are commonplace, everyday occurrences for many of us. Digital technologies facilitate where, how and what we access, and they increasingly offer new methods for capturing, sharing, enhancing and supporting such musical experiences. Presented here is a sample of distinct research activities where we have engaged with a cross section of digital tools to augment novel musical experiences in the physical world, harnessing the mobile and the tangible

Musical intersections across the digital and physical

Digital musical experiences are commonplace, everyday occurrences for many of us. Digital technologies facilitate where, how and what we access, and they increasingly offer new methods for capturing, sharing, enhancing and supporting such musical experiences. Presented here is a sample of distinct research activities where we have engaged with a cross section of digital tools to augment novel musical experiences in the physical world, harnessing the mobile and the tangible

The Connected Shower: Studying Intimate Data in Everyday Life

This paper presents the design and field study of the Connected Shower, a bespoke IoT device that captures water flow, temperature, shower-head movement, and shower product weight. We deployed the device in six UK homes for a week to understand the use of 'intimate data' as captured by IoT systems. Findings from our contextual interviews unpack a) how such intimate data is collaboratively made sense of by accounting for the social order of showering practices as part and parcel of everyday routines; b) how the data makes details of showering accountable to their partners; c) how people reason about sharing intimate data both with third parties and their partners. Our study shows that intimate data is not intimate per se, nor is intimacy a property of the data, but is an interactional outcome arising from the articulation of shower practices to their co-present partners. Thus, judgments as to whether the data is too sensitive, private, or intimate to share are contingent on situated sense-making and therefore subject to change; however, there was a general consensus that sharing intimate data with service providers was acceptable if the data was sufficiently abstract and anonymised. We discuss challenges in the design of trustworthy data-driven IoT systems, and how they need to be warranted to be both acceptable and adopted into our intimate practices

Probing IoT-based consumer services: ‘Insights’ from the Connected Shower

This paper presents findings from the deployment of a technology probe – the connected shower – and implications for the development of ‘living services’ or autonomous context-aware consumer-oriented IoT services that exploit sensing to gain consumer ‘insight’ and drive personalised service innovation. It contributes to the literature on water sustainability and the potential role and barriers to the adoption of smart showers in domestic life. It also contributes to our understanding of context, which enables user activity to be discriminated and elaborated thereby furnishing the ‘insight’ living services require for their successful operation. Problematically, however, our study shows that context is not a property of sensor data. Rather than provide contextual insights into showering, the sensor data requires contextualisation to discriminate and elaborate user activity. Thus, in addition to examining the potential of the connected shower in everyday life, we consider how sensor data is contextualised through the doing of data work and the relevance of its interactional accomplishment and organisation to the design of living services

Detection of PIWI and piRNAs in the mitochondria of mammalian cancer cells

AbstractPiwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are 26–31 nt small noncoding RNAs that are processed from their longer precursor transcripts by Piwi proteins. Localization of Piwi and piRNA has been reported mostly in nucleus and cytoplasm of higher eukaryotes germ-line cells, where it is believed that known piRNA sequences are located in repeat regions of nuclear genome in germ-line cells. However, localization of PIWI and piRNA in mammalian somatic cell mitochondria yet remains largely unknown. We identified 29 piRNA sequence alignments from various regions of the human mitochondrial genome. Twelve out 29 piRNA sequences matched stem-loop fragment sequences of seven distinct tRNAs. We observed their actual expression in mitochondria subcellular fractions by inspecting mitochondrial-specific small RNA-Seq datasets. Of interest, the majority of the 29 piRNAs overlapped with multiple longer transcripts (expressed sequence tags) that are unique to the human mitochondrial genome. The presence of mature piRNAs in mitochondria was detected by qRT-PCR of mitochondrial subcellular RNAs. Further validation showed detection of Piwi by colocalization using anti-Piwil1 and mitochondria organelle-specific protein antibodies

Probing IoT-based consumer services: 'insights' from the connected shower

This paper presents findings from the deployment of a technology probe-the connected shower-and implications for the development of 'living services' or autonomous context-aware consumer-oriented IoT services that exploit sensing to gain consumer 'insight' and drive personalised service innovation. It contributes to the literature on water sustainability and the potential role and barriers to the adoption of smart showers in domestic life. It also contributes to our understanding of context, which enables user activity to be discriminated and elaborated thereby furnishing the 'insight' living services require for their successful operation. Problematically, however, our study shows that context is not a property of sensor data. Rather than provide contextual insights into showering, the sensor data requires contextualisation to discriminate and elaborate user activity. Thus, in addition to examining the potential of the connected shower in everyday life, we consider how sensor data is contextualised through the doing of data work and the relevance of its interactional accomplishment and organisation to the design of living services

Designing Hybrid Gifts

Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalised museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognising the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI researchers engage with the concept of gifting in a nuanced way